Shift: Contemporary Photography Exhibition

Accomplished photographers from across the country will offer unique perceptions and interpretations of our world in a Parkland Art Gallery group exhibition opening Monday, Nov. 12.

“Shift: Contemporary Photography Exhibition,” curated by Parkland College Art and Design faculty member Peggy Shaw, will run through Saturday, Feb. 2, 2013.

In conjunction with the exhibit, an opening reception honoring the photographers is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 15 from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature a curatorial talk by Shaw at 7 p.m. An additional lecture, by exhibit artist Richard Gray, will be held on Thursday, Nov. 29 at 2 p.m. in the gallery.

“Shift” reveals the experimental and exploratory spirit of today’s photographers, whose use of modern photography processes and related technologies allow audiences to glimpse the world of familiar objects in startling new ways, according to Shaw, an associate professor in photography/video at Parkland.

“Photographers have always had to integrate creativity, technology, and process—responding to light, adjusting lens, translating pixels to paper,” Shaw said in her curatorial statement. “As photography evolves, photographers must also, but what is truly revealing are the ways they respond: Open to both contemporary and historical processes now considered alternative, subject and process is twisted to reveal new ideas.”

Working with a variety of lens-based equipment, such as digital cameras, webcams, video cameras, microscopes, and even scanners, each exhibiting artist reveals his or her viewpoint on either our natural world, structured worlds, and/or the body, Shaw said. “These works are not only captured, but created. New technology and processes do not replace the old but add to the options for artists to interpret, and then express their ideas.”

The exhibit participants comprise a mix of studio artists and faculty at several U.S. educational institutions, including Bruce Checefsky, director of the Reinberger Galleries and adjunct professor in liberal arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio; Dana Fritz, professor, Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln; Richard Gray, associate professor of photography and chairperson of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana; Christa Kreeger Bowden, associate professor of art at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia; Joyce Lopez, studio photographer, Chicago; Michael Sherwin, assistant professor in photography and intermedia at West Virginia University in Morgantown; S. Gayle Stevens, instructor of photography at College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois; and Sonja Thomsen, studio photographer, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

For more information on the exhibit and gallery hours, please call the gallery office at 217/351-2485 or visit www.parkland.edu/gallery. Programs at the gallery are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Parkland College is a section 504/ADA-compliant institution; for accommodation, call 217/351-2505.